Jeffrey challenged me to a barghest stat block using the “3rd Edition rules; 4th Edition format” style I talked about yesterday.
As I mentioned to Jeffrey in the comments, the first thing I needed to do was fix the barghest: Designing a monster so that you need to apply new HD to it in the middle of combat is just bad design. Oddly, the designers of 3rd Edition knew this, which is why they included a negative level template (-1 on all checks, -5 hit points, -1 effective level, lose your highest level spell and your highest level spell slot). It seems pretty obvious to me that the way to fix the barghest is to reverse this template (as shown in the stat block below).
Jeffrey also made the point that 3rd Edition’s “laundry-list” of spell-like abilities can be difficult to make work with a 4th Edition-style stat block. I believe the trick of that is to simplify the spell descriptions down to “essential information”. (On the rare occasions when you need more detailed information on the spell, that’s when you crack open the reference manual.)
What really made me interested in rising to the challenge, though, were some thoughts I had on how the 4th Edition-style stat block could be used for shapechangers. Traditionally, I’ve simply gotten in the habit of prepping multiple stat blocks for shapechangers (so that when they change shape, I can just swap stat blocks). But I had some thoughts on color-coding that might make it possible to run them from a single stat block: The colors on the stat block below are coded to conditions described in the monster’s ability. (In this case, coded to different shapes.) The monster can only use colored abilities when the code is in effect (e.g., that shape has been assumed). Black text can always be used.
There are some formatting errors below, but the process I used to build these stat blocks is time-consuming to correct. (So I apologize for being too lazy to fix them.) I have concluded, in retrospect, that supernatural and spell-like abilities should be coded to icons to further clean-up the lay-out, but that hasn’t been executed.
UPDATE: And since I’ve got too much time on my hands, here’s a balor:
The balor’s a little less pretty because I decided to use Microsoft Word and make things easier on myself.
And now I should really stop goofing around with this stuff. If you’re interested, you can play around with the Balor stat block. (That’s a Word document.)
Yeah, I was afraid it would look like that. Thank goodness I didn’t suggest rewriting the balor. 🙂 I just sat down at my computer this evening to take another whack at the barghest myself, when I saw you had beaten me to it. Personally, I feel like blocks this big are also problematic at the table (even some of 4e’s can be too lengthy, especially after MM3’s reformatting- but I think I’ve come up with a decent abbreviated format for those). They take up tons of room on the printed page (leaving less room for the adventure or less monsters in a book), and are a PITA to copy out into my notes. The color coding for different forms/shapes is an interesting idea, though, and definately not one I’ve ever seen any publisher try to take advantage of.
Yeah. I think there’s some valuable ideas here, but it definitely needs to be refined 5 or 6 times before it renders down into something I’d consider usable.
One thing I’ve been looking at recently is how spells slowly accrued more and more situational rulings from OD&D to D&D3. So you start with something like, “A spell to determine if there has been an enchantment laid on a person, place, or thing. It has a limited range and short duration. It is useful, for example, to discover if some item is magical, a door has been “held” or “wizard locked”, etc.” And you end up with an entire stat block, a couple tables, and 6 paragraphs.
It makes sense, because you encounter a situation and you think, “Oh, hey. That’s a question people will ask, so there should be an answer.” But I am wondering how much of this can actually be safely removed because either (a) you trust the DM to make a judgment call or (b) 99% of the time you don’t need to know it, so it’s not that big of a deal if 1% of the time you need to crack a reference book for the specialized stuff.
The barghest also threw me off some potential utility. For example, dimension door could easily be boiled down: “The barghest and 2 touched creatures of Medium size are instantly transferred to a location within 640 feet.” But because the barghest can advance his caster level so easily, I felt like those adjustments needed to be part of the stat block.
So I’ve executed and appended a balor to experiment with further condensing forms.
It is still, of course, a long stat block since he has 16 abilities. This becomes a wider methodological question: WotC’s designers believe that a monster only does 3-5 things before it gets killed, so it should only have 3-5 abilities. I’d argue that (a) creatures get used multiple times; (b) there may be multiple creatures in the same combat; and (c) creatures also get used outside of combat.
In terms of intergrating this sort of stat block into an adventure… Well, that is an interesting question. One option would be to do a “tactical selection”: These are the abilities this balor will use in this particular combat; with the monster manual presenting a deeper selection. In this way, you could actually view the MM listing as a sort of “big toolbox” out of which you pick your tactical selection.
Now that I think about it, this isn’t too dissimilar from how I used to prep these sorts of stat blocks for a particular encounter: I would put the stuff I was most interested in using (or most likely to use) at the top of the cheat sheet.
(And I just spotted some errors. Cleave and Power Attack should be included as melee attack modifiers. And TK has the wrong action type. Ah well.)
There are some bizarre judgment calls made by DM’s. That’s part of the charm though – the role of DM should be one from a person you can trust.
Are you just using word to format these stat blocks, or adobe or some other program? I might be interested in doing these up for a ‘megadungeon boardgame’ 3.5 edition situation.
When I do my own DM screens, or summaries of rules anywhere, I include page numbers. That way I can summarize to the shortest language that still makes sense to me, but if a question comes up, bang! Right to the page. I encourage my players to put page numbers by things on their sheets. That way even if they read something and it doesn’t make sense to them, I can get to it fast too, and rule on it.
The Balor was the actual monster used by WotC’s 3E design team to illustrate their new stat block template which, like I said, became the norm in late 3E.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060707a
I was wondering why you thought the Barghest’s add-hit-dice ability would ever come up in combat. I see that you have it triggering on every devoured creature, while the SRD has it devouring on every third devoured creature. Perhaps they nerfed it to ease the math?
Great looking stat blocks in general, though, and good design in the stat blocks is one of the things D&D really needed a long time ago.
Jeffrey challenged me to a barghest stat block using the “3rd Edition rules; 4th Edition format” style I talked about yesterday.
As I mentioned to Jeffrey in the comments, the first thing I needed to do was fix the barghest: Designing a monster so that you need to apply new HD to it in the middle of combat is just bad design.
I decided to see what I could do with the barghest stat block without changing the design, and without leaving out its rage, crushing despair, and charm monster abilities. I also tried to make it possible to actually apply the hit dice, Str increases, and so forth on the fly, by listing modifiers wherever they apply.
You’re really only adding 2 Hit Dice, then it becomes a greater barghest. So it’s a relatively small set of modifiers. Impossible to calculate at the table though, you have to look up the Hit Dice advancement for outsiders and remember all those Str/Con adjustments. It’s like they thought a computer would be doing all this for us.
Jeffrey also made the point that 3rd Edition’s “laundry-list” of spell-like abilities can be difficult to make work with a 4th Edition-style stat block. I believe the trick of that is to simplify the spell descriptions down to “essential information”. (On the rare occasions when you need more detailed information on the spell, that’s when you crack open the reference manual.)
I want all the information necessary to run the monster in the stat block, so I’ve tried to simplify the descriptions not just to the essential information but without losing any information at all. You can really compress the SRD text a lot losslessly.
What really made me interested in rising to the challenge, though, were some thoughts I had on how the 4th Edition-style stat block could be used for shapechangers. Traditionally, I’ve simply gotten in the habit of prepping multiple stat blocks for shapechangers (so that when they change shape, I can just swap stat blocks). But I had some thoughts on color-coding that might make it possible to run them from a single stat block: The colors on the stat block below are coded to conditions described in the monster’s ability. (In this case, coded to different shapes.) The monster can only use colored abilities when the code is in effect (e.g., that shape has been assumed). Black text can always be used.
This is a pretty good approach. I think you’d need to put the Change Shape ability near the top to establish what the colors stand for. I managed to get all the shapechanger forms in the same stat block, but I just used text labels, ie “goblin form.” Icons with a picture of a goblin and a wolf might work.
Here’s my complete barghest stat block in PDF. This is how much prep you’d have to do to run 3.5E straight from the statblock.